Updates on Intel Xeon Scalable Processors for Microsoft Azure Stack

Today we are announcing the validation of Azure Stack systems with the new family of Intel Xeon Scalable processors (“Purley”). With Azure Stack running on Intel Xeon Scalable processors, customers can expect a boost in performance and capacity (results will vary based on configuration). Intel Xeon Scalable Processors offer new IO stack improvements, support up to 28 cores per CPU, and offer a 50% improvement in memory bandwidth (up to 1.5TB).

Availability dates of these new systems will vary by hardware vendor (Cisco, Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei, Lenovo, and Wortmann/Terra), starting in November 2017 and continuing through February 2018. Details can be obtained by reaching out to those hardware vendors directly. In addition, today Intel has announced Intel Select Solutions for Microsoft Azure Stack which reflects our companies’ shared commitment to accelerate the customer journey to hybrid cloud adoption, via specific solutions that have been tuned and optimized to deploy easily and deliver balanced performance.

Even with these new systems, customers can confidently continue current Azure Stack purchases and deployments. Availability of Azure Stack systems with Intel Xeon E5 v4 family (“Broadwell”) will continue for up to 12 months, depending on the hardware vendor. The scaling architecture for Azure Stack accounts for multi-generational hardware in the same instance by enabling different scale units having different hardware. As a consequence, when this capability is added, customers can increment capacity with multi-generational hardware under the same cloud end point.